Potential Solutions to Human Factors Challenges in Road Vehicle Automation

Book chapter, 2016

Recent research on automated vehicle technologies points to the need to consider drivers’ interactions with road vehicle automation, and to apply Human Factors (HF) principles and guidelines to support timely and safe transfer of control to and from automation. This chapter elaborates on a Human Factors breakout session at the 2015 “Automated Vehicles Symposium” that addressed issues on how humans will interact with automated technologies, particularly considering that a wide variety of designs are either under development or already deployed. A number of key human factors design challenges are outlined including that automation is a cost-benefit trade-off where reduced human performance is a cost; that there are different transfer of control concerns for different levels of automation; that the driver may not provide suitable fallback performance of the dynamic driving task; that the better the automation, the less attention drivers will pay to traffic and the system, and the less capable they will be to resume control; and that the driver may be “out-of-the-loop”—may not monitor the driving environment or be aware of the status of automation. Two suggestions to solve the human factors issues are proposed: (1) to work within given constraints, to design the best we can, according to the given definitions of levels 2 and 3 vehicle automation, or (2) to advise against developing level 3 automation and instead advocate two levels of automation: shared driving wherein the driver understands his/her role to be responsible and in control for driving, and delegated driving in which there is no expectation that the driver will be a fallback for performing the dynamic driving task.